i) The shining moon of wisdom…the clarity, or energy of the mind’s display… inseparable from open emptiness
Below image i) there are some shapes that we call ‘letters’, arranged in groupings we call ‘words’ …
They don’t say anything from their own side…but as we attend to them, the concepts that we apply make them meaningful for us (or not) in different ways… according to our conditioning.
If we have a dharmic orientation they may resonate…but how to attune with the truth that they gesture towards and live from that?
This book offers a way in…and it’s first chapter ‘Getting to know how we are’ is, in my opinion, so very helpful with this.
Part (iii) the final part, is now available to listen to… illuminating how to practise the middle way, beyond extremes…(too tight is at 3’52 and too loose at 11’58)
The creativity of the mind shows itself continuously…
As I look at image i) …the central whiteness of the ‘moon’ seems more brilliant than the whiteness of the ‘page’ on which its set…
…and if I look a while longer, this white disc becomes grey with a white ring around it…
Image ii) could be another visual metaphor…perhaps for wisdom and its absence…
A vision of ice shelves fissuring and melting into the seas….with, just below the centre, a radiant peacock, its extravagant tail hanging down…
Above and to the left of that… Padmasambhava…surrounded by many beings, some enshrouded by their beliefs, others awake or awakening to how it is…and becoming lighter…
But both images are the same, in nature – the showing of no-thing…
Samsaric ignorance or stupidity is not innate but is an on-going ignoring… not looking to see, not opening to receive, ‘how it is’…
Instead we trust in our blind beliefs that ‘how I think it is’… ‘how I imagine it to be’…is how it actually is
So we are pixilated – bemused, bewildered, slightly crazy, intoxicated – as we take the product of our egoic con-fusion of concepts and pixels of light … to be veridical ; )
As we heard in one of James’ teachings, many yeas ago…light + concept equals pseudo-entity…
Image (i) is of the full moon November 2024, (ii) is of the residue left in a grey washing-up bowl…a few days after emptying out the clothes-soaking water! : )